Garmin Opie’s Treasure Chest Sweepstakes


True to his nature, Opie has been stashing away a whole lot of geocaching goodies for the coming winter. It came as no surprise, really, until we saw just how much stuff he had piled up. But after some conversations and coercion, he’s agreed to share his stockpile with his fellow cache creators at OpenCaching.com – but he wants to make it interesting. So throughout October we’ll be giving away his products as prizes to cache creators, and the prizes get bigger and better as more caches get created.

For starters, for every 100 caches created, we’ll give away an OpenCaching.com starter kit to a lucky participant until we reach 1,000 new caches. Once we top 1,000 new caches, we’ll give away a Dakota 20 to one randomly selected cache creator. Crossing the 2,000 cache mark will trigger an Oregon 450t giveaway. And as soon as we hit 3,000 new caches logged at OpenCaching.com, we’ll be giving away a GPSMAP 62stc – and we’ll give one of those away for every thousand caches created thereafter until the end of the month.

Every cache created qualifies as an entry, and to make things even easier, we provide a page to easily import caches you may have listed on other sites to help spread the word about your creations. And in the end, everyone comes out ahead because they’ll have thousands of new caches to find and log. While this specific sweepstakes is open to U.S. and Canadian residents, our offices around the world have been brainstorming – and announcing – exciting promotions for their respective countries as well.

Atanas Entchev – Donate to help

I’ve lifted this directly from his blog:

A Plea For Help

After living legally in the United States for over 20 years, I was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on an immigration charge, and am currently facing deportation. My son Eni, 21, who came to the United States at the age of two, is also detained and wears an orange jumpsuit through no fault of his own. We continue to pursue all possible legal avenues to remain in the US – our home.

However, our 18-year immigration ordeal has depleted our resources. My detention is about to cripple my small IT consulting business. We cannot keep up with our growing expenses, and I have no other choice but to turn to the community for help.

I ask friends and sympathizers of our cause to donate to our legal fund. No donation is too small. Please spread the word.

Thank you for your kindness, and God bless you.

Posted for Atanas Entchev, by his daughter, Christina

Atanas Entchev

It is disturbing to hear this happen to Atanas.  There is a Paypal donation link on his blog to fund his legal defense and I’d urge everyone reading this to give at least a few dollars.  What I do know about Atanas is that he would be the first to give to anyone else’s cause so we should pay him back in kind.

Google Adds +1 to help your site

When was introduced the +1 button in March, Google search took a small step in an important direction. Search results can be more helpful, and more personal, when recommendations from the people you trust are there to guide your way.

The +1 button can help publishers, too. As potential visitors see recommendations from their friends and contacts beneath your Google search results, you could see more, and better qualified, traffic coming from Google.

Since we announced +1, we’ve gotten lots of requests from Google search users and webmasters alike for +1 buttons in more places than just search results. That’s why today we’re making the +1 button available to sites across the web. Sometimes you want to recommend a web page after you’ve visited it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that great article on Spanish tapas if you haven’t read it yet?


We’ve partnered with a few sites where you’ll see +1 buttons over the coming days:

Partner Logos

AddThis Mashable Huffington Post Rotten Tomatoes Nordstrom O'Reilly Reuters Washington Post Best Buy TechCrunch Bloomberg

You’ll also start to see +1 buttons on other Google properties such as Android Market, Blogger, Product Search and YouTube.

Adding +1 buttons to your pages is a great way to help your content stand out in Google search. By giving your visitors more chances to +1 your pages, your search results and search ads could show up with +1 annotations more often, helping users see when your pages are most likely to be useful.

To get started, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central. You’ll be able to configure a small snippet of JavaScript and add it to the pages where you want +1 buttons to appear. You can pick from a few different button sizes and styles, so choose the +1 button that best matches your site’s layout.

In the common case, a press of the button +1’s the URL of the page it’s on. We recommend some easy ways to ensure this maps as often as possible to the pages appearing in Google search results.

If your site primarily caters to users outside of the US and Canada, you can install the +1 button code now; the +1 button is already supported in 44 languages. However, keep in mind that +1 annotations currently only appear for English search results on Google.com. We’re working on releasing +1 to searchers worldwide in the future.

If you have users who love your content (and we bet you do), encourage them to spread the word! Add the +1 button to help your site stand out with a personal recommendation right at the moment of decision, on Google search.

To stay current on updates to the +1 button large and small, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Buttons Announce Group. For advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site. Finally, if you have any questions about using the +1 button on your websites, feel free to drop by the Webmaster Help Forum.